


Butterflies and Dahlias

by fourdaysofrain



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Fluff, Gen, Puppy Love, Romance, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:21:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22461799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourdaysofrain/pseuds/fourdaysofrain
Summary: “This MJ gal,” Tony said, pointing at Peter with a screwdriver. ”You like her?”“What?” Peter’s mouth stayed partly open, his train of thought evidently derailed by Tony’s question.“You like MJ.”---Tony helps Peter with his crush on MJ.
Relationships: Michelle Jones/Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 44
Kudos: 190





	Butterflies and Dahlias

Peter had been texting someone on his phone since the moment he set his bag down in the lab. Not that Tony minded, he was too busy with his current project: restoring his dad’s old radio. It normally sat on his nightstand, but recently it had taken to playing random stations from Norway a few hours before sunrise. Tony wanted to blame Thor, but it was more likely a side-effect of a past upgrade gone wrong. Whatever the issue was, Pepper was not a fan. That meant Tony had to fix it. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Tony saw Peter look up from his phone and glance out the window of the compound’s lab. He squinted a bit at the sun shining into his eyes. 

“MJ says that commuting to your workplace is an example of economic privilege,” he said, apropos of nothing. 

“Yeah?” Tony looked up from his desk to assess the teen across the room from him. “Why’s that?”

“It’s something about how it makes you need enough money to buy a car, and the ability to pay for gas, and free time, I think?” Realizing that Peter was just rambling in his  _ excitable teenager  _ way, Tony turned back to his desk and continued to work on fiddling with the radio. ”‘Cause you need to be able to have time to commute instead of like, take care of your kids or something. I told her that Happy drove me here.”

“She sounds like a peach. What else does she say?” Tony replied distractedly, searching for the right size screwdriver. 

“She also says that me wearing Ben’s old work shoes is closer to the original spirit of Doc Martens than the people at our school who buy them new.” Peter put his phone down on the table and started moving his hands in time with his words. ”She told me the history of them, it’s really interesting!”

The damn screw was such a weird size. “Is it?”

“Yeah, ‘cause it’s like, they were the working class of the 50s and 60s’ work shoes, and then the workers’ children would get them as hand me downs, and that’s the generation that started rock music and all that, so they have a rebellious history.” Peter jumped up to sit on a nearby table and continued to talk excitedly. ”She also told me about the racial history of a bunch of music genres. Did you know salsa music has a lot of African influence? I never knew that! It’s something about the syncopated beat structure, I don’t know.”

“Tell me about it,” Tony said mindlessly. He finally found the right size screwdriver and successfully started to reattach the back panel of the radio. 

“Even the definition of syncopation is ‘the  _ disturbance _ to the  _ normal  _ pulse of meter.’ Like, what’s the normal meter then? Whatever a bunch of old European white guys decided on?”

Tony noticed the lull in the conversation and gave a quick, “Mhmm.”

“There’s just so much whitewashing in our culture! Like, so much.” Peter paused for just a second to quickly check his phone. ”I really should be more aware of that stuff, especially because Queens is so diverse. And Spider-Man’s trying to be inclusive of everyone.” 

“Is he now?” Tony asked, his attention still on the radio in front of him. 

Peter nodded as he continued to speak. “I worry that I come off as too white savior-y when I’m saving people, but I brought up Spider-Man being white to MJ and she said she thinks he’s doing pretty good. So, it can’t be that bad, right?”

Tony finally dragged his attention away from his desk and looked over at Peter. He looked a little deranged, with his hair askew and cheeks slightly flushed. 

“This MJ gal,” Tony said, pointing at Peter with the screwdriver. ”You like her?”

“What?” Peter’s mouth stayed partly open, his train of thought evidently derailed by Tony’s question. 

“You like MJ.”

Peter laughed nervously and ran a hand through his hair. “No! I mean like, yeah, I like her, she’s one of my friends. But like,  _ like  _ like her?”

Tony leveled him with a steady look. “Do you?”

There were a few beats of silence as Peter leaned back until he was laying down on the table and looking upwards. Tony could hear his sigh from across the room. 

“I think I like MJ,” he said, staring desolately at the ceiling. 

Tony took off his tinted glasses and set them carefully on his desk. “Hey, good for you.”

“No, what?” Peter pushed himself up from his position until he could make nervous eye contact with Tony. “This is bad!”

“C’mon, kid, brighten up! You’re 16, the world is your oyster, and so on and so forth.” Tony waited for a reaction from Peter, but none came. “Have I told you about when I knew I was in love with Pepper?”

Tony had always held his cards close to his chest when it came to his personal life, so Peter perked up at the prospect of learning more about him. 

“When’d you know?” he asked.

“Besides seeing her after I got the new ticker,” Tony said, tapping his shirt where his scars from the arc reactor were with the screwdriver he still held. “There was a night after I got it removed, nothing special about it, where I just looked at her and knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.”

Peter rested his head in his hands. “Why that night?”

Tony looked off into the distance and smiled, lost in thought. “I had just given her a necklace that was made with the shrapnel they yanked out of my heart. I’m not normally big on romance, so that sealed the deal for me.”

“Just like that?” Peter asked. “It just took a necklace?”

“It wasn’t  _ just a necklace,  _ it was a…” Tony trailed off as he searched for the right words, waving the screwdriver in lazy circles near his ear. “It was a culmination of years of tension.”

Peter scrunched his nose. “Gross.”

“It’s not gross, it’s romantic.” Tony sniffed and set the screwdriver back on his desk. “You’ll get it when you’re older.”

There was just a moment of silence before Peter started talking again. 

“So,” Peter said, starting to swing his legs off the side of the table, “I need to buy her a necklace, then.”

“It’s not about the necklace, kid.” Tony waved away the remaining holograms and gave Peter his full attention. ”It’s about what it represents.”

Peter sighed and fell back onto the table. “I don’t have any shrapnel in my heart, man.”

“What’s something,  _ anything,  _ she’s told you about that you can make lovey-dovey?” Tony asked, barely holding back an eye-roll. 

“I don’t know.” Suddenly, he lifts his head up and looks at Tony. “Wait, she mentioned the Black Dahlia murder the other day, that’s a flower, right?”

“That’s a flower,” he confirmed, pointing at Peter. “What can you do with that?”

Tony waited while Peter thought. 

After a few seconds, Peter cringed and smiled awkwardly before saying, “I can get her a necklace of a black dahlia?”

Tony ran his hand through his hair.  _ This kid.  _ He sighed, then clapped his hands together. 

“Alright, kid. If you’re going to do this, you’re doing it right.” He pulled his phone out and started tapping as he rambled. ”I know a great glassworker in Italy who can fix you up with something real quick. I’ll cover the cost and shipping, of course.” He ignored Peter’s muffled squawk of surprise. ”Unless you want to get it yourself, in which case I can loan you a private jet. Or, just make a healthy donation to fund a field trip for your AcaDec team to go to Europe--”

Peter cut him off by waving his hands. “Woah, woah,  _ woah!  _ Mr. Stark! Italy? We’re going to MoMA next week, I can’t go to Europe!”

“Alright, I hear you. No Europe.” Tony clicked his phone off and slid it back into his pocket. He saw the forlorn look on Peter’s face and tilted his head towards him. “Look, kid. You like her. Just be your normal dorky self. Don’t pretend to be anyone you’re not.”

Peter sighed and shoved his fingers into his hair. “Mr. Stark, I spend half my free time pretending to be someone I’m not.”

“Oh, kid.” Tony couldn’t hold back a chuckle at the sight of Peter unraveling over a girl. “You want the easy way?”

Peter jerked his head up to look at Tony. “Yes,  _ please.” _

Tony could see the desperation in his eyes.  _ Oh, to be a teenager again.  _

“There is no easy way,” Tony said as he slid his tinted glasses back on. “Get used to it now.”

Peter groaned and laid back down on the table, hitting the back of his head on the surface a few times for good measure. 

**Author's Note:**

> I can write a little fanfiction to procrastinate. As a treat. 
> 
> Find me on tumblr: [spider-beep](spider-beep.tumblr.com)


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